My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (18 page)

Over the next day, negotiations are held in the rectory of St. George’s Cathedral. Present are Shmaryahu Gutman, who is now the military governor of Lydda, and the dignitaries of the now occupied city. The bewildered dignitaries are anxious to save the lives of their flock, whereas the cunning Gutman is eager to expel the lot without giving an explicit expulsion order. When negotiations end in the late morning of July 13, 1948, it is agreed that the people of Lydda and the refugees residing there will exit Lydda immediately. By noon, a mass evacuation is under way. By evening, tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs leave Lydda in a long column, marching south past the Ben Shemen youth village and disappearing into the East. Zionism obliterates the city of Lydda.

Lydda is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda. From the very beginning there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be. In retrospect it’s all too clear. When Herbert Bentwich saw Lydda from the white tower of Ramleh in April 1897, he should have seen that if a Jewish state was to exist in Palestine, an Arab Lydda could not exist at its center. He should have known that Lydda was an obstacle blocking the road to the Jewish state and that one day Zionism would have to remove it. But Herbert Bentwich did not see, and Zionism chose not to
know. For half a century it succeeded in hiding from itself the substantial contradiction between the Jewish national movement and Lydda. For forty-five years, Zionism pretended to be the Atid factory and the olive forest and the Ben Shemen youth village living in peace with Lydda. Then, in three days in the cataclysmic summer of 1948, contradiction struck and tragedy revealed its face. Lydda was no more.

When, twenty years ago, I realized that Lydda was our black box, I tried to decipher its secrets. I found the brigade commander and spent long hours with him. I located the military governor and spent long days on his kibbutz with him. I spent time with soldiers from the 3rd Regiment and interviewed students from the youth village. To write this chapter, I dug out the audiocassettes I had recorded at that time and listened to them as they told the story of the death of Lydda.

The brigade commander was born in 1923 in Kovna, where his father worked with Dr. Lehmann. He was raised in a socialist household in Tel Aviv, but at the age of fifteen he was sent to the Ben Shemen youth village, where he immediately became the favorite of his father’s old friend. On Shabbat mornings he was invited to the Lehmanns’ cottage to listen with them to rare recordings on the gramophone: Haydn, Mozart, Bach. On holidays he escorted Dr. Lehmann as he made courtesy calls in the neighboring villages. Occasionally he went with Dr. Lehmann to visit friends and schools in Lydda. He took to Lydda, its market, its olive presses, its old town. At Ben Shemen he worked in the cowshed, the vineyard, the orange grove; he played handball and developed a taste for the arts. But most of all, he loved music: classical music, popular music, folk music. One of his favorite memories of Ben Shemen is of hundreds of students sitting in silence in the great courtyard listening to an orchestra and choir perform Bach’s Peasant Cantata.

But in addition to the humanistic, music-loving world of Ben Shemen, the seventeen-year-old lived in an alternate reality. At night, he and his friends would go to the forest beyond the youth village, where they learned to assemble and dismantle an English rifle, to shoot a machine gun, to throw a grenade. And when the music lover graduated from Ben Shemen, he joined the first platoon of the Palmach Strike Force. In the winter of 1942 he climbed Masada. In the summer of 1942
he went south to stop Rommel’s Nazis with Molotov cocktails. At the age of twenty-one he became a company commander. At twenty-three he became a commander in a nationwide training course. At twenty-four he was a regiment commander. When war breaks out at the end of 1947, the Ben Shemen graduate commands one of the elite units of Zionism.

Is the brigade commander aware of the contradiction between his two worlds? Can he combine the Lehmann disciple with the warrior? He has no clear answers to these questions. When he speaks of the fighting up north he is surprisingly open. The voice coming out of the tape recorder says plainly that the mission was the cleansing of the Galilee before the invasion of Arab armies. The Jewish state about to be born would not survive the external battle with the armed forces of the Arab nations if it did not first rid itself of the Palestinian population that endangered it from within. So first they sweep away all the Arabs from the Tiberias-Safed region. Then, in April 1948, they conquer Tiberias, whose Arab population departs under military pressure from the superior Israeli Army. Then they conquer and demolish the Arab villages around Safed. In May they conquer Safed, whose Arab population flees under fire. Then they drive away the villagers of the Hula Valley. By the end of May 1948, the Hula Valley is cleansed of Arabs. The entire Safed-Tiberias region is cleansed of Arabs. All of the eastern Galilee is cleansed of Arabs. Under the command of Ben Shemen’s graduate, the eastern Galilee becomes an Arab-free zone, and an integral part of the new Jewish state.

But when the brigade commander speaks of Lydda, his voice changes. Now he sounds quiet, almost agonized. He sounds cautious, perhaps not quite candid, as if when talking about Lydda he is suddenly aware of the contradiction and the tragedy. He speaks slowly as he tells me how he conquered the villages to which he used to accompany Dr. Lehmann on his Shabbat visits: Gimzu, Dahariya, Haditha. He speaks quietly as he tells me how he conquered the valley and the city of Lydda. He describes the morning he was informed that Jordanian armored vehicles had broken into the city and learned, shortly afterward, that some of the 3rd Regiment’s Ben Shemen graduates had been attacked. He tells me he was the one who gave orders to shoot anyone walking along the streets of the city, the one who gave orders to evacuate the city. He
and the military governor were the ones who sent the people of Lydda out of Lydda in a long column heading east.

The brigade commander is clearly torn. The voice coming out of the tape recorder is unconvincing. It’s not that he is purposely hiding anything from me. He himself does not know what he feels. His talk of Lydda is vague; it lacks colors, smells, details. While he remembers his Ben Shemen years vividly, he only vaguely remembers the conquest of Lydda. He does not mention the schools he visited, the families he knew, the community he was so fond of. He does not speak at all about the city he loved and destroyed. Only his muted tone surrenders what he holds back. His first apology: We were surrounded. His second apology: We were under imminent threat from within and without. His third apology: There was no time, I had to make an immediate decision. His fourth apology: Horrible things happen in war. But not one of his apologies seems to convince him, or to begin to explain the suppressed three days of Lydda’s death.

Bulldozer is very different from the brigade commander. Although he, too, is traumatized by the war of ’48, his mental injury is not the same. Rough and coarse, he tends to raise his voice too much. He’s tense and quick-tempered, restless. He admits that in the damned war he lost his peace of mind. In the many years since, he has not been able to find inner calm.

Bulldozer was also born in Eastern Europe but was raised in Tel Aviv. At seven, he was returning from school one day when an Arab threw a bomb from a passing train onto busy Herzl Street, wounding dozens and killing an eight-year-old boy standing nearby. That day it became clear to him that there would be an all-out war with the Arabs. Although as a teen he walked to Arab Jaffa and made Arab friends, he always knew that between us and them there was a sword. He always knew that eventually the land would be decided by war.

He was exceptionally strong. He boxed, rode horses, excelled at sports. The size and strength of his body gave him his nickname and made him the boys’ leader and the girls’ favorite. At the age of fourteen he became a member of the secret Haganah. At the age of fifteen he began grenade training. At sixteen he trained at a firing range with live
bullets. At seventeen he climbed Masada. When Bulldozer joined the Palmach at the age of eighteen, he did so not because he believed in some sort of kibbutz utopia, but because he wanted to be with the best of the best when war arrived.

The first months of 1948 are easy: village raids, roadside ambushes. But after he is trained to be an antitank missile operator, warfare becomes intensive. The 3rd Regiment needs his bazookalike antitank weapon in most operations. April, May, and June are impossible, inhuman. A close friend is killed, then another, and another. Pain becomes rage, and rage becomes apathy. There is no time to comprehend, no time to mourn, no time to weep. They have to drive the Arabs from the Galilee and thwart the Syrians and Lebanese forces invading the Galilee. Conquer the Galilee, cleanse the Galilee, defend the Galilee. Ensure that the Galilee is Jewish.

The raid on Ein Zeitun is the first time they go down into an Arab village not to take revenge but to conquer. Bulldozer vividly remembers the midnight anticipation. He remembers the assault, the firestorm, and the surprise: how easy it is to conquer a village. When the 3rd Regiment boys break into the stone houses they find only burning lanterns, warm blankets, milk boiling over from pots. They walk into homes abandoned by their inhabitants who had taken fright and run away into the night. He recalls the eerie feeling of witnessing a living village become a ghost village in one night.

The first brutal deed Bulldozer remembers carrying out is the prisoner-of-war interrogations. For a moment his self-assured voice is hesitant: May one tell? But after a pause comes the flood, and the need to talk overpowers the imperative not to talk. Because he is big and strong, Bulldozer is assigned to assist the intelligence officer as he interrogates seven of the young men captured in Ein Zeitun. One by one he ties the terrified prisoners to a low bench, so that their foreheads touch the ground at one end and their feet at the other. Once he hits the head of a prisoner with a short stick, and then he hits the prisoner’s legs with a long stick. And once he starts beating the prisoners of war he begins to enjoy beating them. He feels he is avenging the dead, that he is doing what his fallen comrades would have wanted him to do. He makes the seven prisoners tell the intelligence officer all that they know. He makes them bleed so much that they cannot stand up.

Next is the conquest of Safed, the first time the 3rd Regiment conquers a city. The beginning is difficult. Bulldozer finds himself nearly alone as an armed Arab mob storms the building he is in. The mob shouts “Slaughter the Jews.” Ammunition is running out. He feels the cold shudder of approaching death. But by morning there is a dramatic turn of events. Jewish reinforcements arrive and the Arabs retreat. With his Canadian rifle and fresh rounds of ammunition, Bulldozer hunts down the Arabs seeking refuge between the old stone houses of the ancient city. He feels delight in hunting. Delight in killing. The almost sexual pleasure of laying men down.

After the battle subsides, Bulldozer goes to the local hospital, where he finds three of his buddies lying on the floor in a cold corridor—their faces alien in death, frozen in horror. As tough as he is, he is frightened. A week later, because he is the last to return from a late-night operation in some Arab village, he boards the last truck at the collection point. Half an hour later, he realizes that the boys he is with are lifeless. Once again, he feels fear. He has a sudden, rare moment of understanding of what these few months of war have done to him, what a nightmare he is living.

In late May, he is in the Jordan Valley. He experiences one of his worst hours when he is sent with his PIAT rocket launcher to stop the invading Syrian tanks that are approaching Kibbutz Degania. He stands alone watching the first tank head toward him, watching it target him. At the very last moment he fires his PIAT first, halting the tank while wounding himself.

He experiences another bad hour when he sees the survivors from two Jordan Valley kibbutzim who have escaped their incinerated homes. The shock of seeing kibbutz members turned refugees makes him think for the first time that defeat is possible. He realizes that the war he is participating in might end with the death of Zionism. And if Zionism dies, what will happen in the Land of Israel will be what has happened time after time in Europe. Jews will be Jews again: they will be helpless.

By the time Bulldozer arrives in the Lydda Valley, he is exhausted. He has seen too much, done too much, killed far too much. This time he is not trigger-happy. But when the orders come, he obeys. He marches with the 3rd Regiment platoons from the silvery olive orchards into Lydda. And when the sun rises, he wanders the streets of Lydda looking
for a camera shop he can loot—he so loves cameras. Suddenly, there is shooting. There are rumors of invading armored vehicles, of friends trapped in the ditch by the small mosque. When Bulldozer approaches the small mosque, he sees that there is indeed shooting. From somewhere, somehow, grenades are thrown. He instructs one of his subordinates to fire an antitank PIAT into the small mosque. When the shell-shocked soldier refuses and departs, Bulldozer takes the PIAT into his own hands. Although he knows that shooting a PIAT in the narrow alley means that the PIAT operator himself will be hurt, he decides to shoot anyway. He dismantles the door of a public lavatory situated in the narrow alley and tries to hide his huge body in the lavatory as best he can. He does not aim at the minaret from which the grenades were apparently thrown but at the mosque wall behind which he can hear human voices. He shoots his PIAT at the mosque wall from a distance of six meters, killing seventy.

The training group was made up of 120 youth movement graduates from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa whose mission was to establish a new kibbutz on the shores of the Red Sea, close to Eilat. In the summer of 1947, the eighteen-year-old boys and girls trained for kibbutz life in an older kibbutz by the Sea of Galilee. They cleared fields, built communal housing, mended fishing nets, worked in the banana plantation and in the cowshed, took sheep out to pasture. Ten days a month, they studied topography and navigation and learned how to handle a submachine gun and assemble explosives. But for the rest of the month they maintained their communal lifestyle: they held a literature class, an arts seminar, a political economy workshop, and a course on Zionist thinking. They analyzed the inherent contradiction of capitalism, that it tramples the dignity of man; they wondered whether man makes history, or whether history makes man. They read Tagore, Zweig, Hesse, and Rosa Luxemburg; Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon
, Gandhi’s
The Story of My Experiments with Truth
, Buber’s
I and Thou
. They played and listened to music: Mendelssohn, Paganini, and Domenico Cimarosa, to whom they took a special liking. In the woods by the Sea of Galilee, sitting in a circle around a gramophone, the boys and girls of the training group listened again and again to Cimarosa’s tragic oboe, whose sad sound was
echoed by the rustling of the eucalyptus trees and the lapping of the lake’s waves.